Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells: Doll & Em is about jealousy and love between best friends

‘People don’t admit to being jealous, especially of people they love,’ says Emily Mortimer.

‘But there’s that paradox of wanting the absolute best for those people that you love and yet still being a bit jealous of them when they get the absolute best. It’s so human but we’re not very open about that in our society.’

Mortimer, it seems, is more open than most. Jealousy – and its effects upon a friendship – is one of the themes explored in the new Sky Living comedy series Doll & Em she not only stars in but created and wrote with her best friend, the actress and comedienne Dolly Wells.

In it, both women play heightened versions of themselves. The on-screen Emily is a successful but needy Hollywood actress who persuades Doll – who is recovering from a break-up in London – to relocate to LA and become her assistant.

‘The minute you start paying your best friend to do something for you, all bets are off and the s*** will hit the fan at some point,’ says 42-year-old Mortimer when we meet on set in a house in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking the sprawl of LA.

The pair first met as seven-year-olds on a joint family ski trip and both grew up with famous parents.

Mortimer’s father was the creator of Rumpole Of The Bailey, John Mortimer, while Dolly’s was the satirist and Private Eye writer John Wells.

‘Apart from my nearest and dearest family, nothing is more important to me than my closest friends,’ says Mortimer. ‘Those people who have known you all your life and know everything – know the worst of you – and still love you; those friends are your lifeline.’

Their long-standing bond has endured despite Mortimer moving to New York with her husband, US actor Alessandro Nivola, but it has meant lengthy transatlantic phone calls to Wells back in London.

But eventually – after two children each and countless years of fibbing – the mythical script became a deadpan and self-deprecating reality.

‘What I’ve realised as I’ve got older is a lot of our friendship is based on fun,’ says 41-year-old Wells, ‘on wanting to cheer each other up and enjoy being alive. There was so much fun in writing this.’

They filmed the pilot episode while Mortimer was playing MacKenzie McHale in HBO drama The Newsroom.

‘We didn’t think anybody was ever going to see the pilot, so there was no pressure and it was all just hilarious,’ she says.

‘There’s a scene in which Doll is crying and I was chucking water on to her face from the tap in my trailer, while there was someone banging on the door saying: “Emily, come on, we’ve got to get on the set,” and we were both in hysterics.’

That level of frivolity is not a given when it comes to making film and television.

‘I’m always paranoid and stressed out about every job I do,’ says Mortimer. ‘I always think I’m terrible and I’m going to get fired.

‘Everyone feels nervous when they start a new job and, as an actor, you’re starting a new job all the time, with a completely new group of people. But having Dolly with me on this journey made me feel so much braver.’

Along with cameos from A-list friends including Susan Sarandon, Chloë Sevigny and Andy Garcia, the co-creators roped their respective partners and offspring into Doll & Em. Nivola is producing, Wells’s husband, photographer Mischa Richter, is doing the stills as well as playing Emily’s husband, while Wells’s children, Ezra and Elsie, play Emily’s children.

‘It could have been chaos, we could have fallen out, but the show has felt like a real family project,’ says Wells.

‘And because of that, we both felt very strongly that we didn’t want to let people down, that we wanted to make this the best it could be.’

‘There was also a real feeling of protecting one another,’ she adds. ‘When we were younger, we always used to say that we felt much more powerful together than we’d ever have been apart.’

Their bond looks set to become closer with Wells and her family having recently moved from London to Brooklyn, living a street away from Mortimer.

‘I keep thinking, what happens if people are really mean about the show?’ says Mortimer. ‘That wouldn’t be very nice but because we’re in it together, it doesn’t really matter.’

The models first met in LA in 1992 when Moss was 15 and Campbell 18. During Moss’s recent 40th birthday celebrations, Campbell paid tribute to her catwalk bestie by saying: ‘Kate and I have seen each other through the good and the bad. You can count on your hands the friends who’ll be there for you in the tough times, and she’s one of them.’

The Celebrity Juice team captains have been BFFs since meeting on a CBBC set 14 years ago and have even written a book entitled The Best Friends’ Guide To Life. Cotton says: ‘It just seemed natural for Holly and me to do something together.’

Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt – a friendship borne out of a shared love of Nina Simone and Harry Nilsson (Picture: Frazer Harrison/WireImage.com)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel

Proving a girl and a boy can be just good friends, the pair met in 2000. Deschanel says: ‘We bonded over an appreciation for Harry Nilsson and Nina Simone.’

Gordon-Levitt admitted to Playboy magazine that dating Deschanel would be ‘awkward’, adding: ‘It’s fun to have conversations, watch movies with her and stuff like that.’